I previously discussed on Twitter that Michael Cohen seemed to me to be in violation of the standard obligations of federal prisoners given furloughs during the pandemic when he was seen at a high-end restaurant. His lawyer strongly disagreed that Cohen’s conduct violated the conditions but Cohen has now been taken back into custody according to media reports. This is not the first time that Cohen’s culinary impulses have gotten him into hot water.
Cohen was captured eating at Le Bilboquet restaurant in Manhattan that features a few dishes not aware in the federal correctional system like Escalope De Veau Aux Champignons. What is bizarre is that the restaurant allows for take out but Cohen was willing to take this risk to get out on the town.
I have admitted been a critic of Cohen long before he broke with the President. His conduct as an attorney was a disgrace to the bar for years.
We previously discussed how Cohen was seen out on the town in New York on the day that he told Congress that he was too sick to appear for testimony. The House Democrats ignored such infractions and alleged false statements by Cohen.
Cohen spent his career as a legal thug threatening journalists, students, and anyone viewed as a threat of President Trump. He has spent his life discarding rules that apply to others whether they are found in the New York bar rules or the criminal codes. This is consistent with his conduct throughout his life. Nevertheless, he has repeatedly reinvented himself, including a claim of victim status.
His counsel Jeffrey K. Levine is quoted as saying that Cohen “did not violate any of the terms and conditions of his release … and any assertion or suggestion to the contrary would be wholly inaccurate and untrue.”
Under the governing rules, furloughed inmates must not “leave the area of his/her furlough without permission, except for traveling to the furlough destination, and returning to the institution.” The furlough was not granted for because virus containment protocols of the Federal Bureau of Prisons lacked provisions for an aperitif and canapé.
Update: It appears that Cohen has been put into solitary confinement for 14 days.
Oklahoma?
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-court-oklahoma/u-s-supreme-court-deems-half-of-oklahoma-a-native-american-reservation-idUSKBN24A268
Who would have thought…
Hey Turley, when you (correctly) stated that Cohen’s conduct as an attorney was a disgrace for years, don’t forget that Cohen was acting With the blessing of, and as the agent of, Donald Trump. Doing his master’s bidding. Birds of a feather….
https://www.wsj.com/articles/we-might-get-fooled-again-11594336612
We Might Get Fooled Again
The policy mistakes of the 1960s and ’70s laid the foundation for the identity politics of today.
By Mike Gonzalez
WSJ
Faced with general unrest in the streets, will America’s political, corporate and media leaders panic? Will they acquiesce to bad policies that the nation will regret for decades? You can count on it, because that’s what happened the last time America was convulsed by racially charged riots.
Some 700 riots shook America between 1965 and 1971, leaving devastation in their wake. Between 1965 and 1968, more than 300 riots left 250 people dead and hundreds of millions of dollars in property damage, according to historian Hugh Davis Graham. The establishment lost its nerve and capitulated. Militants intimidated politicians, college administrators and midlevel bureaucrats into laying the foundation for the identity politics that rankle our lives today.
In response to the activists’ demands, the policy makers of the past blessed the federal bureaucracy’s creation of racial and ethnic categories and the related use of racial preferences for university admissions, employment and government contracting. The formalizing of groups, the addition of incentives to adhere to them, and the culture of victimhood that the whole scheme instilled, betrayed the colorblind promise of the civil-rights movement. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 was intended to cure problems like segregation. Instead, by creating an incentive system based on grievances, the architects of identity politics all but ensured victimhood would never end.
That didn’t matter to men like La Raza executive director Raul Yzaguirre, who urged the Census Bureau in 1974 to abandon national origin questions and instead create groups. “There is a difference between a minority group and a national origin group—a difference recognized in terms of national economic and social policies,” he wrote.
The racial activists of the late 1960s and early ’70s insisted they were acting on behalf of the grass roots. Not so. The real images of the period, writes John D. Skrentny in “The Minority Rights Revolution” (2002), weren’t angry raised fists: “The images of the minority rights revolution are mostly of mainstream Euro-American males and minority advocates, wearing suits, sitting at desks, firing off memos, and meeting in government buildings.”
As for the leaders of the establishment, many believed that racial preferences and the balkanization of identity politics would be temporary. Forty years later, we know how wrong they were.
McGeorge Bundy was President Kennedy’s national security adviser. No Boston brahmin was more representative of the elite set. By the time he left Camelot and took the helm of the Ford Foundation in 1966, the era’s riots were fully underway. Bundy and the other foundation executives “had little idea about how to stop the rebellions or their negative impact on ‘the American body politic,’ ” according to historian Karen Ferguson. “Fear of the destabilizing impact and revolutionary possibility of a sustained black revolt drove virtually all American social policy, public and private, during this crisis.”
Bundy and his team believed in a staggering stratagem that Ms. Ferguson calls “developmental separatism.” The theory held that only after a period of ethnic separation could assimilation take place at some time in the future. One could say that they invented modern identity politics.
Already in 1969, the Ford Foundation was making “grant proposals directed at increasing the group identity and power of minorities.” Via large grants, the foundation created the National Council of La Raza and the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund.
They also midwifed racial preferences. Key passages of Justice Harry Blackmun’s frequently quoted concurring opinion in Regents of University of California v. Bakke, the 1978 Supreme Court case that cemented racial preferences in college admissions, were lifted almost verbatim from a 1977 essay Bundy wrote for the Atlantic. It was Bundy who wrote: “To get past racism, we must here take account of race. There is no other present way.”
Bundy wasn’t alone. Following the Detroit riots, Michigan Gov. George Romney co-founded an organization called New Detroit, which funded black nationalists who had little actual support among African-Americans. According to Jake Klein of the Capital Research Center, New Detroit produced a school curriculum that contained the first mention of the notion that racism had to include both prejudice and power. Such identity-based schemes failed to close the gap because, as Ms. Ferguson notes, they reduced the problems of the black community to a “psycho-cultural and therapeutic issue of black identity without having to deal with the structural and material issues.”
Today we see the same problems. Take the effort to “defund” or “dismantle” police departments. The rich will always be able to buy their own private protection. But how will leaving entire urban areas without the protection of the law help our most impoverished citizens?
Or consider the call for reparations, backed by the New York Times’s Nikole Hannah-Jones, creator of the “1619 Project.” Talk of reparations distracts us from addressing the cultural dysfunctions that ail Americans of all kinds, such as family breakdown. Payments for race-based suffering will further enshrine resentments as the basis for attention, assistance and sense of self-worth.
The unseemly rush by corporations to outwoke each other has already filled the coffers of radical organizations like the Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation, whose stated goals include the destruction of the nuclear family—the very institution that needs shoring up. Meantime, the push by newspapers and other media companies to silence voices that dissent from these “remedies” will only ensure that the country walks into more problems without a real debate.
We have been here before. Our leaders panicked and let ideologues dictate terms. Let history be our guide this time.
Mr. Gonzalez is a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation and author of “The Plot to Change America: How Identity Politics Is Dividing the Land of the Free.”
Michael Flynn is a political prisoner.
Turley, next stop Foxnews. Move over Hannity.
Is the furlough location his residence, or his neighborhood? Is it a form of house arrest?
I don’t know anything about furlough rules. However, Cohen clearly isn’t worried about catching Covid-19 if he is dining at a restaurant in the hardest hit city in the country.
Judge Sullivan has waited until today to ask the Court of Appeals en banc to review the Flynn issue.
If the Republicans regain the House impeachment of this judge should be an immediate priority.
Young – I thought Sullivan had to the 6th.
Paul– I am not sure how long Sullivan had but you are likely correct. On the other hand, who follows rules and laws anymore? Certainly judges don’t. I wonder what will happen when the people who truly believe in the system and want to support it lose faith in it? That’s where I am now. The hooligans in the streets are mirrored by hooligans in the courts and government. They keep saying Trump is a dictator. He isn’t, but if he decides to be Napoleon and stop the Revolution I think I am for it now. Never believed I would think that, but Obama judges, and people like Schiff and Pelosi and mayors like those in Seattle, Chicago, Baltimore, Atlanta, etc. have brought me to that point.
How long until the en banc review?
I don’t know. I am not sure the request will even be accepted. If it is I imagine the other Obama-type judges will drag it out asking for briefs to accept it and then briefs on the issue and then oral argument and then a few weeks to talk their way out of their previous rulings to get it as near to November as they can. I would not be surprised if their decisions had nothing whatsoever to do with what we used to call ‘law’.
Judge Sullivan actually calls the mandamus order a “dramatic break from precedent that threatens the orderly administration of justice” without any sense of irony.
Makes one wonder if he is senile as well as wicked.
You thought wrong. CADC rules say 21 days from the date of the opinion, which is next Wed.
And yet he could have done it within a few days. And didn’t.
And you could have looked up the rules instead of telling Paul “you are likely correct.” But you didn’t.
Sullivan and his lawyer clearly should have filed their petition according to your schedule rather than theirs ./s
What does ‘likely’ mean to you?
“What does ‘likely’ mean to you?”
It means you lied. There was no chance that the petition was filed in violation of the rules.
In this case, your use of “likely” means that you recognized you didn’t know, but may have hoped that what Paul said was true, and pretended that that hope was a judgement about the likelihood instead of just looking it up and/or making the more natural assumption: that as a DC judge, Sullivan knows more about CADC’s actual rules re: timing than Paul does.
Young, “if Republicans regain the House”???
Well if this virus disappears and the economy roars back by November, ‘maybe’ that could happen.
Seth– Or if the Republicans find the spine [unlikely] to place endless loops of Democrats allowing hooligans to destroy cities and kill people. Maybe then.
Young, you might be right. That’s probably why Trump made that threat to ‘shoot looters’ several weeks ago. He was hoping to incite civil unrest. And he did!
Trump knows his only path to reelection is to basically stoke a low-level civil war and hope the Bernie Bros go totally nuts.
It’s ironic because Trump was essentially ‘endorsing’ Bernie back in January. Back then Professor Turley was writing “Poor Bernie’ columns every day. And all the Trumpers on this blog kept commenting with “Poor Bernie!”.
Trump isn’t stoking the civil war and you know it. That is coming from Democrats, hence the value of pinning that flaming tail on the Donkey.
The media, most of corporate America, all politicians on the left, almost all of academia, most of Hollywood, and a good portion of garden variety hand-wringers on the left are all supporting BLM, which IS trying to stoke a low-level civil war.
And yet, in your opinion, Trump must be the real evil for not going along with this entire charade.
Lorenzo, right now this country is suffering a triple crisis: Pandemic, Recession and Civil Unrest.
Now, more than ever, we need a statesman of a president who can unite the country and lead the free world.
But Trump is trying to alienate our allies as fast as a possible. Our leadership in the world is nonexistent at the moment. Our response to this pandemic has been on a third world level!
Here in the U.S. the virus is surging in all the Red States that tried to reopen early (to please Trump). Schools and universities are honestly not sure if it’s safe to reopen this fall. Yet Trump is threatening to cut-off federal funding to schools that delay opening.
What’s more, Trump’s mindless defense of Confederate statues and constant attacks on BLM are stoking a far-left backlash.
Only the stupidest of idiots could think Trump deserves reelection. Never have we seen a president try so, so hard to rip this country apart.
Lack of evidence noted in your position, along with complete hyperbole.
Better watch out who you are calling a stupid idiot.
Seth and Book garnish their points with insults. Apparently they think it makes them more convincing. When I was about 12 I tried the “You moron” type of argument and discovered it convinced nobody and could sometimes be painful.
Seth– But Trump is trying to alienate our allies as fast as a possible.
******
Evidently you missed the joint press conference in which President Obrador of Mexico praised Trump for fair dealing and for respecting the sovereignty of Mexico rather than taking a Monroe Doctrine approach in dealing with the country. Apparently you missed the praise from Indian leaders bestowed on Trump. Watch something other than CNN.
Civil unrest to Seth means the victims fighting back
yes i mean the law abiding victims of the riots
it’s not a civil war until one side shoots back at the other. until then it’s just a massacre
Kurtz you were one of the Trumpers singing “Poor Bernie” every day. Now you know what Bernir Bros are really like.
Seth, when I saw some of the O Keefe videos taping his campaign volunteers saying crazy stuff, I thought they were outliers.
but apparently a lot of young white folks are so crazy in the head they want to perpetuate their own physical destruction
I feel that the discussion about income inequality and deindustrialization that bernie used to raise routinely were good issues
Trump addressed them in his own way. And yet now his Federal Reserve has flooded trillions into financial schemes that are exacerbating it worse than anyone can have imagined possible just a year ago, due to the COVID crisis. But neither Trump nor anybody has much questioned this, certainly not the Wall Street Democrats, either.
Now it’s all sliding into chaos. Who knows where it will all end up.
End of July will probably be a nasty moment when the extra unemployment money dries up.
I don’t think you’ve heard: there is no such thing as a “Biden supporter.”
Anon–I suspect not even Jill supports this if she has a care for her husband. If I were her I would be afraid to oppose the powers behind this wicked elder abuse.
It was my understanding that he had two weeks, and that any such petition was time barred as of the close of business yesterday.
Absurd–That sounds about right but I am not inclined to actually check. Why bother if they are disposed to ignore their own rules. Maybe they should review Marbury while they are at it. Time hasn’t run on that and its progeny yet, has it? In truth, more and more I am thinking that Marbury was a mistake and that Jackson had the right idea telling the Court to go enforce their own ruling while he did what he wanted. Things are falling apart.
The separation of powers is exactly what makes the “living constitution” exactly that. It can come into effect at any time in the shape of a “constitutional crisis” and then it’s GAME ON BABY
Yeah, filing for a rehearing en banc is clearly impeachable behavior. /s
Committ – the en banc is not automatic.
Duh. If someone said it is, you should tell that person, not me.
Guy eats at a restaurant and is immediately back in custody. Mayhem with Marxists in the streets and they’re walking. Quite the justice system we have.
I hope he enjoyed his dinner, but he should have had it delivered to his home. Personally, I can’t imagine any meal worth going to prison over.
Well said Mr Espo, these are crazy times.
Actually, I think the NY Post’s Page Six outed him. Besides, the Post had pictures of him dining out, not a condition of his parole.
While Turley makes sure the letter of the law is written in stone for Cohen, not so much for Manafort, Flynn, or Trump. On a another note, we are all waiting for Turley’s post about the SCOTUS today, maybe he didn’t get the talking points from Barr yet.
“The murder rate in New York City more than doubles, massive numbers of residents leave, closed schools hit minority families hardest… but hey, Mayor Bill De Blasio is hard at work painting you a pretty mural”…that says Black Lives Matter.” (ben domenech)
Fishwrap:
Read his twitter feed imbecile!
Fish wings,
You seem to know very little, about the letter of law. you know even less if seems, about Flynn and Trump. And, nothing at all about Manafort. Yet you seem to speak out anyway. Silence would make you look less obviou of your hatred of Trump. It can turn a brain into mush.
Joe Biden must release all of the Biden papers in his collection housed in Delaware. No public official can deem his papers “private” and off limits to the public when it was work he did while holding public office and paid for by taxpayers. No Trump tax returns until all the Biden Delaware papers are released in full.
Tell it like it is, brother.
‘The House Democrats ignored such infractions and alleged false statements by Cohen.’
Turley has now sunk to these depths, to chastise The House Democrats-which ones, well all of them, of course; while describing the carryings on of a former Trump lieutenant. Is Turley counting on a Trump win in November and maybe a bump up the ladder? While not openly and clearly denouncing Democrats-don’t burn all bridges-he plays his cards carefully. Turley is moving in Cohen’s direction, just a little but in that direction. After all it is the law.
Turley is becoming a right wing lap dog.
Another topic for him to write about it Berman’s opening statement to the HJC and what it says about Barr:
https://www.politico.com/f/?id=00000173-347b-d439-a573-7eff89930000
What was Cohen convicted of?
He never should have been furloughed. He has learned absolutely nothing from his trial or incarceration. He still thinks that rules are not for him.
I’m sure you called Barr right away, right Turley. And Manafort sits in his townhouse with butlers.
Brennan should be in prison. Comey should be in prison now. Strzok should be in prison now. McCabe should be in prison now. Susan Rice should be in prison now. And about another dozen or more lying and leaking high level Obama officials –all proven liars on television, proven liars while under oath — every last one of them should be prosecuted and put away. Make examples of them! No justice, no peace!